I've been trying to watch more anime recently, so I've been trying a couple things on netflix.
Kuroko's Basketball eps 1- 4 or 5
Well I wasn't sure I'd ever bother giving a sports shonen title a watch, but I've finally done it and I've taken my shot on Kuroko. Is this anime generally well received and considered a good example of its genre? I don't know anything about the show, but it seems like a pretty decent bit of sports shonen. It's almost exactly how I would have guessed it would be I suppose, it's got the 5 legendary rivals with preternatural superpower-esque abilities and the dude/team that wants to be the best in Japan. It's the classic formula, but it's not bad. The show looks nice to me, decent animation and I like the colour palette and settings. The characters are ok so far, mostly vaguely likable archetypes if not lovable yet, although Kuroko himself is by far my favourite, but of course there's plenty of potential for things to improve as we learn their backstories and they develop. The stupid shonenisms, as always, do grate on me "swear to strip naked and confess to the girl you like if we don't win the championship" ect, and the whole quest to become "no 1 in Japan" is such a tired and untouching goal. But that's where my hope lies, as the show seems to be planting seeds, through the character of Kuroko, of an eventual renunciation of such a bone headed hubristic ambition in favour of a simple love of playing the sport you love with the people you love. But maybe that's also just a part of the classic formula, I haven't watched enough shonen to know, but I hope that is the direction it goes in.
Violet Evergarden eps1-2
So I finally clicked on this, and it seems like a more interesting show than I assumed it would be, although I don't know why I assumed it wouldn't be, probably just because I tend to assume most things produced by netflix aren't great. Well firstly it's a visually beautiful show, gorgeous, it clearly has high production values. Although for me it's almost too beautiful; I'm not usually captivated much by the whole nostalgic idealised European aesthetic, and for me it's only made worse by how insanely beautiful looking everybody and everything in the show is. I can appreciate it sometimes but I can only handle small doses I think. It's like having too much sugar or being made to read Shakespeare's sonnets all day. Although of course there seems to be plenty of pain and darkness and melancholy in this show too, and maybe the prettiness was meant to contrast against those things, but it all just makes it feel all the more potentially cloying. But this could well win me over, there's plenty to appreciate and keep me watching, I like the set up about being a letter writer and trying to learn what love is through that, and I want to find out more about mysterious Violet. Why do the writers have to be so annoyingly called "auto memory dolls" though?